New Book by Janick Bergeron Provides Techniques for Writing, Running, Debugging and Verifying the Correctness of SystemVerilog Testbenches

NEW YORK, April 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Springer Science + Business Media, a major publisher of professional books and research journals in engineering, today announced the publication of Writing Testbenches Using SystemVerilog authored by scientist Janick Bergeron of Synopsys, Inc. The book is intended to help design and verification engineers with a basic understanding of the VHDL, Verilog, OpenVera(R) or e languages learn advanced verification techniques using the SystemVerilog IEEE Std 1800(TM)-2005 standard language. The book provides verification engineers with an easy-to-learn introduction to all elements of a modern, scalable verification environment and a foundation for adopting the advanced verification methodology detailed in the Verification Methodology Manual (VMM) for SystemVerilog. The new book builds on Bergeron's highly successful Writing Testbenches: Functional Verification of HDL Models.

"Mr. Bergeron has once again written a book that is a standard-bearer for engineers tasked with verifying RTL and systems design," said Chris Kniker, Technical Manager, at Transwitch Corporation. "This latest version, using SystemVerilog as a vehicle, details a comprehensive methodology and shows how to take advantage of the powerful capabilities that SystemVerilog provides. As the engineering community struggles to keep up with the task of verifying larger, more complex designs, the strategies and methodologies put forth by Mr. Bergeron become more important to the success of every verification project."

Writing Testbenches Using SystemVerilog introduces the necessary concepts and tools of verification, describes a process for planning and executing an effective functional verification project and outlines the concept of coverage models that can be used in a coverage-driven verification process. The book covers simulators to source management tools, specification to functional coverage, "ones and zeros" to high-level abstractions, interfaces to bus-functional models, transactions to self-checking testbenches, directed testcases to constrained-random generators, and behavioral models to regression suites. Additionally, the book presents many of the functional verification features that were added to the Verilog language as part of SystemVerilog. Interfaces, virtual modports, classes, program blocks, clocking blocks and other SystemVerilog features are introduced within a coherent verification approach and usage model.

"This new book builds on the wealth of information from the previous version of Bergeron's book Writing Testbenches: Functional Verification of HDL Models, which has become the linchpin of many companies' verification strategies, now refreshed and retargeted for the SystemVerilog language," said Brian Bailey, of Brian Bailey Consulting, and chairman of the Accellera Interfaces committee.

"The 'perfect storm' was forming for this new book: SystemVerilog was adopted as an IEEE standard, simulators started to support the testbench constructs and the VMM for SystemVerilog was published," said author Janick Bergeron. "This created the need in the electronic design community for educational material to help users understand the benefits of SystemVerilog and adopt good practices from the start. Writing Testbenches Using SystemVerilog is a great companion to the VMM for SystemVerilog, and explains the techniques and the trade-offs behind the methodology for users who were not already experienced in hardware verification languages."

Springer is one of the most renowned scientific publishing companies in the world. Its engineering program publishes over 400 books and reference-works a year, in subject areas such as Circuits and Systems, Design Automation Nanotechnology and other related topics. Within the specialist publishing group, Springer Science+Business Media, the two former companies "Springer-Verlag" and "Kluwer Academic Publishers" (KAP) merged in February, 2004. Since July, 2004, the "newly" created Springer publishes under a new brand. You may visit Springer at
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